While Atom isn’t setting any performance records, it is amazingly powerful for its size and power consumption. In making Atom, Intel made sure to give it an equally impressive chipset: Poulsbo. The combination of Atom and Poulsbo unfortunately uses too much power and is too big to be used in the most attractive of devices: smart phones, relegating them to MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). MIDs aren’t terribly successful, mostly because they are bulky, plagued by terrible UIs and too expensive for what they are. In a couple of years Atom will surely find its way into smart phones thanks to Intel’s push for integration, but thanks to the Netbook segment Atom hasn’t gone unappreciated.

Largely pioneered by the efforts of ASUS and obsession with the letter E, the Netbook market is almost entirely dominated by Intel’s Atom CPU. In order to keep costs down, Netbook manufacturers have paired Atom with a desktop chipset instead of Poulsbo: the Intel 945G. Since Atom’s FSB can work in GTL+ mode, it is compatible with Pentium 4/Core 2 chipsets.

Atom is honestly fast enough for many tasks, delivering the performance of a mainstream notebook from 4 years ago. The problem is that there are some applications that are commonplace today that can’t run on Atom. HD video playback isn’t possible on Atom + 945G platforms because the CPU isn’t fast enough to decode high bitrate video (much less H.264) and the chipset doesn’t support HD video decode acceleration.

We all knew this was possible. Why is everyone so surprised? The Asus EEE box has an ATI 3450 but nobody wet their pants over it. Asus has a netbook with the 9300M chipset but it is not selling that well. The 9400M is a great chipset, but it is simply filling a void that Intel left open by not allowing their G45 chipset to be used with the Atom.

Nobody is going to be playing many games on this thing. Maybe WoW but that is about it. The Atom is pretty slow guys. I have one. It works, but it isn't very fast. You definitely can tell that you are using a slow machine.

And why is everyone so excited about using this as a front end for a media center? VMC does not have softsled so you can't use it as an extender. MythTV can't play Blu-ray videos. I suppose you could rip them. Myth just now got some video acceleration. Boxee and XBMC don't use video acceleration at all so you lose the advantage of the 9400M. That leaves a few niche DVR applications and SageTV (which you can argue is also niche) where this thing would be useful as a HTPC client. A sageTV extender or popcorn hour are much more useful IMO than this.

As a low power desktop replacement it just doesn't do it for me. I would never consider using an Atom as a main machine, and it has been proven that a cheap Pentium Dual core and a G31 chipset are actually just as low power and 4-5 times faster than an Atom. Adding a 9400M won't change that. If all you want is a torrent box you can get routers that do that for you.

Ok, so the picture of it playing Dark Knight is cool. But I'm not going to dirty my pants over it.

I think it's because people like the direction things are going even if the details aren't worked out yet. I'd to see this in the future with a dual core Atom and could see using that as a low power tiny basic desktop. The software/hardware chicken and egg is always going to be there, someone just has to blink first and in this case NV has blinked and created reference hardware. Reply

The ASUS uses the Discrete version of the 9300m. (Nvidia has both a 9300 integrated chipset as well as a discrete chip in the GS variant and the G variant.) The discrete mobile is different from the integrated mobile which is different from the desktop version

The 9400 integrated variant is using 16 shader chip
GPU core running at 580Mhz
Shaders clocked at 1.4 GHZ
But it is using the faster DDR3 ram, how much memory it is paired up (steals from the rest of ram) with is dependent on the OEM.

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That said the netbook you refer to is using the single core n270

n270 2.5w TDP 1.6 GHZ, 1/2 MB Cache, 533 FSB (C States aka its different idling modes C0, C1, C2, C3, C4)
n230 4w TDP 1.6 GHZ, 1/2 MB Cache, 533 FSB (C States C0, C1) Pretty much the same chip but does idle as well as has a higher TDP
n330 8w TDP 1.6 GHZ, 1 MB Cache, 533 FSB (C States C0, C1) Same thing as the N230 but there is two chips on the same die.

In either case its a benefit. For single channel configurations, I think its pretty much a given that they would have to go with DDR3 at a decent clockrate to avoid bottlenecking the IGP significantly. Reply

That's an impressive little basis for an integrated box. If it were cheap enough I'd pick one up just to have a tiny low power web browsing box and wouldn't even turn on my main PC half the time.

Things it needs though: 1) more than one internal SATA connection, HD+optical at a minimum needs two. No USB for optical please. That kind of dashes the hopes of some that have posted here except it does have eSATA ports...are they functional? 2) Although Atom is 'sufficient' I'd like to see a true (not HT) dual core variant. VIA Nano would be nice atm, or just wait until it's available with a dual core Atom. Reply